Survivor bias. If nothing existed [1], we wouldn't be here to ask the question.
It's like asking what is P(A|A).
The question "Why do I not exist" has never and will never be (seriously) asked.
[1] To be clear, if only nothing existed, and there existed nothing other than nothingness. [2]
[2] I sense epistemologists warming their guns here, asking if the "existence" of "nothing" counts as the existence of "something". I.e. is "nothing" something?
It is still possible that nothing exists. For example, if physics rules are an algebra where you start with nothingness, and nothingness is then combined with nothingness in various ways. Then, from the inside it appears as if things exist, but from the outside it seems that nothing exists. Somewhat similar to a computer game which may look like an entire world from the inside, but you see only a bunch of computer chips from the outside.
I don't think so. There has to be a plausible survivor for survivorship bias. Living forever is advantageous to being a member of a survival cohort, and yet survivorship bias hasn't discovered any immortal people. Is there a plausible reason for things to exist that would explain why existence survived as an outcome?
Isn't it the opposite of what you suggest? If there was nothing, there would be nothing to investigate; but now that we now the universe exists, it does make sense to ask why is that something exists rather than nothing.
I see what you mean. But with biology, every organism has a different biology. I can take a plant or an animal and study its biology as an external and impartial observer.
With respect to the question of the existence of everything, I can't take the Universe or a Universe and study its properties as an external and impartial observer.
If I was the only organism in the Universe, I could still try to study my body and reach limited conclusions, like we do with physics, but I couldn't go further without dissecting myself or injecting myself with potentially hazardous substances, which would kill me. And I certainly would never be able to answer the question of where I came from if I didn't know about the concept of gender, sex, and reproduction, which I couldn't know about if I was the only organism to have ever existed from my point of view.
Stephen Hawking famously confused gravity for "nothing" when he said “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing."
He was an incredible intellect, but not everything he said is going to be a winner.
Anything exists because of survivor bias? That's backwards logic / you've missed/evaded the question.
It's not like asking P(A|A), it's not even asking why P(A) > P(N). It's asking why P(A) > 0, which it evidently is.
Statistically, one could make the argument that there are infinite possibilities of A(nything) and just one of N(othing), so the odds are stacked infinitely high against nothingness.
> Statistically, one could make the argument that there are infinite possibilities of A(nything) and just one of N(othing), so the odds are stacked infinitely high against nothingness.
This reminds me of the classic joke that all probabilities are 50/50. Either a thing happens or it doesn't.
I don't get what point you're trying to get across with this comment. The question at hand is essentially one of causality, but you seem to be avoiding it? Addressing your points one by one:
>Survivor bias. If nothing existed [1], we wouldn't be here to ask the question.
Survivor bias leading to the question is not the reason anything exists, in the same way you being alive to ask this question is not the reason you're alive. In both cases existence is simply a pre-requisite to asking the question, but it does not answer it.
>It's like asking what is P(A|A).
No, that is misinterpretation of the question. The question is not "What is the probability that anything exists, given that anything exists?", it's asking "Why does anything exist?", as per the title.
>The question "Why do I not exist" has never and will never be (seriously) asked.
Haven't given much thought to this, and at face value, yes, you're right. But "seriously" is ambiguous and there are some interesting questions here regarding the possibility of an evil demon like entity, or, more interestingly, GPT-3 posing this question.
Is this really a dismissal? You say "it is like asking what is P(A|A)" but that is just another notation for the logical proposition A.
Saying something is like someone asking questions about logical propositions generally isn't considered bad form: logic actually has more to recommend it than probability theory - logic is when probability theory suggests certainty and probability theory is what you get due to logic applied to hidden information. Logic is therefore always more certain and stable than probabilistic claims: it is what you have when certainty exists.
I don't find the statement which translates to it being like reasoning perfectly to be particularly strong as a dismissal. It doesn't even seem to merit the rank of disagreement - the article does go into discussion of logical propositions and has it very near the fundamentals. So saying it is like it is effectively just a repetition of what the article states, but using different words.
You appear to me to be stating premises within the text and implying that the existence of logical reasoning means you disagree, but that doesn't quite make sense to me. To dismiss the argument would require that you first disagree with it at least once, which you haven't done, and probably ought to have a stronger foundation that the rejection of logical relationships. After all, if you reject those, then you've also rejected probability theory - with it your reject observation, which is related to both logic and probability via sampling. The rejection on the basis of being like logic has corollaries of claiming to be both blind and incapable of coherent reasoning. This isn't a very strong basis for dismissal.
> I liked the table comparing many disciplines' default instance of nothing:
> Physics: No energy: the vacuum
And not being aware of the difference can lead one to dumbly misunderstand the question with confidence (e.g. some physicist explaining how the universe could have arisen out of "nothing," when they're really explaining how it could have arisen out of a vacuum, which metaphysically is definitely a something).
> Can you, metaphysically, define nothing? I ask because I wager you can't,
Are you saying that you can't define "absence"?
But asking me is silly and pointless: I'm no philosopher. And even if philosophers have trouble, that doesn't mean there's no merit to the concept: it just means its difficult.
> and I am highly suspect that metaphysics has philosophical value.
I'm pretty sure you meant the exact opposite of what you actually said, and I strongly suspect you're wrong.
I had a shower thought the other day: clearly conservation of energy is just a guideline and not a fundamental law. Otherwise, how could anything exist?
A former physics professor of mine said that energy was not in fact conserved in the Universe because the expansion of the Universe consumed the energy. The total available mass-energy in the Universe is decreasing over time.
Or, a prior universe collapsing in a "big crunch" and then re-exploding back into existence. Or two objects colliding. But those theories just push the moment of creation back farther in time and the question is still relevant where those objects came from.
If you like questions like this, you'll probably enjoy the Closer to Truth series. All of its episodes since 1999 are on YouTube.
With regards to "why something rather than nothing", here's an article on the "levels of nothing". Even if there were to be no universe, no laws, etc ... could mathematics still exist?
What interests me is that if there is only the point, there's no external system for reference. So the point has no coordinates, no observable properties... right?
To observe something, you need another reference frame.
Without an external reference frame, there's no extrinsic information about the point, and if the point is dimensionless, then there is no intrinsic information, either.
What you are left with, is the notion of a point, with no way to describe or observe it.
As a philosopher, I recommend that anyone read up on ontological anti-realism before they get too invested in the answer to questions like these.
Carnap and Quine (to say nothing of Kant) wrote extensively about the problems that arise when treating metaphysical "existence" as a predicate.
There are strong reasons to adopt ontological anti-realism. I'm amused when folks muse extensively in the ontological mode without addressing the elephant in the room—most of it is likely nonsense.
I see how your response makes sense in terms of questions like "why does an electron exist", but what about the general notion of existence? It seems self-evident that there is something, even just experience. I interpreted the question as more "why something rather than nothing" which seems coherent.
I don't really follow. I interpret "there is" and "something" as quantifications, not predicates. What would be the predicate here?
The general notion of existence, at least in natural language, seems to be a shorthand for quantification or negation. I'm not sure what it would mean for "existence" to exist, short of adopting Platonism or some bizarre metaphysical system.
The "something rather than nothing" question, if stated coherently, would likely be beyond the scope of human knowledge. Although ultimately I don't think it can be stated in a way that makes sense.
Experience exists. Whether the contents of the experience are "real" or "not real", it is not coherent to claim that there is truly nothing at all -- what could even cause one to come to that conclusion if there's nothing at all? Platonism is one of the few (only?) games in town in terms of potential ability to furnish answers here (a Popperian scientific method has well-defined boundaries on the scope of explanatory power) -- and the more indications we get that physics can be derived from number theory and combinatorics, the more seriously I think it will be taken as a research topic. A more formally developed Platonism would also potentially be able to address the "something rather than nothing" question.
Why do you think "something rather than nothing" question doesn't make sense?
Well, I can't engage "Experience exists" because I don't treat "exists" as a predicate, as I stated earlier. What you seem to be asserting as straightforwardly true looks to me more like a malformed sentence. Yes, words and concepts arise in our language and are metaphysically constrained by reality. However, it seems to be quite a departure from this milquetoast linguistic fact to assume that natural language would, could, or even should map to the structure of reality—especially with respect to heavyweight "existence" claims—in any meaningful way.
I adopt ontological anti-realism and do not stray into "existence" claims because they simply raise too many methodological issues. The quotes here are important because I don't have an intuitive understanding of what people mean when they say "exists" in the first place.
You could rephrase "Experience exists" as "Humans experience" or "I experience," which is analogous to Cogito in Cogito, ergo sum but without the ergo sum. There's a subject and a predicate already, and "exists" adds nothing.
If you want to make substantive claims about what does or doesn't exist, your views are subject to relatively straightforward reductio ad absurdums. This is demonstrated pretty clearly in On What There Is.
> Why do you think "something rather than nothing" question doesn't make sense?
"Something" = quantifier, "nothing" = quantifier, existential "is" = quantifier. Again, I would insist on a predicate here.
Carnap and Quine both argue that treating metaphysical "existence" as a predicate leads to a number of problems. In particular, they argue that it is not possible to know what exists independently of our own perceptions and experiences. This means that any claims about the existence of things beyond our own experience are necessarily speculative and cannot be known for certain.
"Metaphysical realism is the thesis that the objects, properties and relations the world contains, collectively: the structure of the world [Sider 2011], exists independently of our thoughts about it or our perceptions of it."
This is _necessarily_ true, to believe otherwise is to make an absurdist claim that humans are somehow special. It's "the earth is the center of the universe" all over again.
Of course, you could always take the truly absurd way out, and claim that _you_ are what is special, and everything else is mere simulacrum for you by you. By all means, admit to this.
I suppose this kind of thing is fun to think about, but this kind of claim, which appears to be the main one, is metaphysical, not scientific, in that it appears to make no testable predictions, as far as I can see:
> "Mathematical truth implies the existence of all computations. The existence of all computations implies the existence of all observers. The existence of all observers leads to a quantum mechanical reality populated with all possibilities and ruled by simple laws."
Extra points to the author for including a link to Eugene Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" (1960). For convenience:
In a vacuum with no matter or radiation, presumably the laws of physics still exist, and therefore it will be emptiness forever. As King Lear said, nothing will come of nothing. But if the laws of physics themselves did not exist, then nothing could indeed come from
nothing - what’s to stop it?
I wonder if the first part of the statement is true actually. What if the laws of interaction between space, energy and matter were poured in along with the space, energy and matter itself?
On the similar theme of "things we don't have answers to yet":
When I was five years old I asked my dad what was beyond the "edge" of the Universe. He said "There is no edge, it goes on infinitely forever. Even if there was an edge, there would have to be something beyond that, even if it was a vacuum right?".
I literally cried myself to sleep trying to visualize this.
Cool to see someone articulate this specific point. My dad has some grad schooling in astrophysics so we used to chat about this kind of stuff when I was young (still now but less so).
I’d always ask “if the universe is expanding what is it expanding _in to_” and he’d kind of always change the subject to black holes or something.
Thinking back on that it’s amazing how easy it is to “question” or “push/poke” the boundaries of known (or even knowable) knowledge. But alas guess it just furthers the point of how all people ponder these things.
Cool to see this. I'm interested in orthogonal models that provide different types of leverage in the same broad arena of thought. Replacements for "exist", "real", even "dream," "simulation," etc.
IOW words or phrases that skip the rather prominent liabilities of those same (tired?) words/models but also work well at such a global scope and scaffold nicely.
Having listened to a dozen YT videos and podcasts on the subject, I am kind of an expert (just kidding). But I can relay one view a few brilliant people invested into the subject have about the issue: that reality is a set of all possible states. Of what states? Well literally anything.
Imagine a wave that can at any point oscillate up or down. If it does both and splits, it eventually will create all possible states of anything imaginable. Some of the waves become more and more complex, until in very rare cases structure and rules form within the wave function itself. Akin to Conway’s Game of Life. So universes with (seemingly) deterministic laws of any kind are just extremely rare sub-trees of this wave of ”every possible wavestate”.
All the peculiarities like dimensions are illusions the same way a multidimensional array to a computer is ultimately just one-dimensional, with logic to treat it as multi-dimensional.
I also like the explanation that concept of nothingness is categorically invalid because there clearly is existence (or is there? Maybe this is the ultimate ”nothing”?), but the theory of all possible states sounds even better.
Definitely not claiming this is true but intuitively feels like the best explanation for this existence… that this universe with all its laws is a rare sub-tree of all possible states of a simple oscillator. Other universes with other laws exist further up the tree in its other branches. In between, voids and vacuums and undeterministic universes
This all-states model has a lot of impact in relevance to claims like "belief systems generally have a knob you can turn to point at (and accommodate) any desired outcome/belief".
It seems like a good idea to move away from such a reality model in that case. Ideally to replace it with either several good plugins or a new metamodel which can encompass its strengths and weaknesses.
I.e. reality can be a helpful term to describe "I found a new and helpful perspective for looking at a thing." That's a big strength and one commonly seen as people migrate between beliefs.
Looks like an appeal to the divine, in that it doesn't explain anything but does push the question up a level.
"Why does something exist?" "God did it." "Uh, ok, why does God exist?" "Dunno, just does." <- sure seems like you could have simply applied that last answer to the first question and it'd be exactly as useful and valid.
"Why does something exist?" "The set of all possible wave states exists and behaves such-and-such way" "OK, but why does that exist and why does it do that?" "Dunno, just does". <- Ditto.
There is something about this that at least partially satisfies the question, in that it simplifies as you go one level up.
With the "God did it" explanation, something vastly more complex and inscrutable is required (i.e. God) to make the explanation work. With this explanation, there is but a simple wave that splits on its possible oscillations. Our existence is on one of these.
No explanation will ever find the "bottom turtle." There will always be space for another "why?" question. The interesting part is probably more to do with the "asker" this question rather than the answer to it. That we have this capacity to think abstractly about this is, to me, more mind-blowing than the nature of existence itself.
The only thing problematic about “appeals to the divine” or other explanations that “push the question up a level” is if part of the explanation is the prohibition of “where did that thing come from?” or “why is it this way and not some other way?”
But pushing things up a level is actually the only option we have for good explanations. For any explanation about anything whatsoever, you should always be able to ask “why is it this way rather than some other way?” It’s not some paradox or contradiction that there will never be an end to this series of explanations and questions, and any claim that there is an end is the bad kind of “appeal to the divine”!!
From a mathematical/algorithmic point of view, you could define a good explanation as a sort of compression process: on one hand, you have observations, data to explain, totalling a certain number of bits. On the other hand, you have a process or algorithm that can generate these observations, and if that process can be described in less bits than the original observations, then you have a "good explanation". For example, our current theories for the laws of physics are excellent explanations, because they can explain a virtually infinite number of real observations from finite information.
On the other hand, if the observations are truly random, then in general no shorter process can produce them, so there can be no good explanation for them. And the interesting thing is that if every good explanation compresses the original observations at least one bit further (otherwise they would not be good), there must be a point where the result is as short as it could possibly be. At this point, the series of good explanations would have to end (although I believe that it is undecidable to know when the end is reached).
It is also always possible for something that has a good explanation to actually be a brute fact, like the idea that the Earth was created with the appearance of old age: the good explanation would be that it aged, but the truth would be that it didn't.
I don’t think the length of the explanation is very relevant, and finding shorter explanations doesn’t seem like a primary concern. Explanations should be judged on what problems they solve and how well they stand up to criticism and competing explanations. And since I don’t think any explanation can be “final” or “100% true” or “guaranteed” or anything like that, the notion of a shortest possible explanation doesn’t even make much sense.
True if the level you shift it up to has some further explanatory value and/or can be demonstrated or proven in some fashion. If it's just "well, it might be this thing that we can't prove" then, until you've turned that notion into something you can test or at least support with observations, it's just "god did it".
I think "there's something rather than nothing because the set of all possible waves exists... like, somewhere" is roughly identical to "god did it", as opposed to, say, a hypothesis that things fall and planets orbit due to a universal force that causes matter to attract other matter, even if both just prompt another "why?" You can go do stuff with the latter—not so much with the former, which is more of a dodge than even a partial explanation.
A good test might be whether you can apply the answer to any "why?" that lacks an existing answer, with exactly the same utility and validity in every case. Take the example of the question suggested by the explanation of universal gravitation:
"OK, why does gravity exist, then?"
"God did it / that's just what our little corner of the set of all possible waves happens to look like"
There's simply no specificity to them, and they amount to "just because".
Stephen Wolfram actually wrote an article suggesting that that's basically it although he frames it as the set of all possible formal rules interacting with each other:
"So how does this help us understand why the universe exists? We’re starting from all possible rules. And basically we’re saying that having a universe that operates in the way we perceive ours to operate is an inevitable consequence of there being all these possible rules. Or, in other words, if these rules “exist” then it follows that so will our universe.
But what does it mean for rules to “exist”, and in particular for all possible rules to exist? The key point, I believe, is that it’s in a sense an abstract necessity. The set of all possible rules is something purely formal. It can be represented in an infinite number of ways. But it’s always there, existing as an abstract thing, completely independent of any particular instantiation.
It’s crucial that we’re talking about all possible rules. If we were talking about particular rules, then we’d need to specify which rules those are, and we’d need a whole language and structure for doing that. But that’s not our situation. We’re talking about all possible rules. We can construct some explicit symbolic representation for these rules, but the deductions we make ultimately won’t depend on this; they would work the same whatever representation we chose to construct.
We might have assumed that to get our universe we’d need some definite input, some specific information. But what we’re discovering is that our universe is in some sense like a tautology; it’s something that has to be the way it is just because of the definition of terms. In effect, it exists because it has to, or in a sense because everything about it is a “logical inevitability”, with no choice about anything."
The part positing the existence of a hypothetical set of all possible formal rules sounds a lot like the cosmological argument for the existence of God.
Ever since I read this xkcd comic https://xkcd.com/505/ I've suspected something like this - once you abstract a simulation of the universe this far, if you can accept that a person inside this simulation would not be able to tell that they were in a simulation, then it kind of raises the question of whether actually performing the simulation is necessary. I can't see why it would be. If that's the case, then it follows that "reality" is merely an expression of one possible consistent set of rules. Which solves a lot of mysteries, I think.
> So universes with (seemingly) deterministic laws of any kind are just extremely rare sub-trees of this wave of ”every possible wavestate”.
Wow!
This is very similar to what I experienced when I accidentally ingested a large amount of psilocybin (and went to ER just in case, it was the most terrifying experience of my life).
This is what I wrote in my notes post the bad trip:
"I felt a disconnection from my self and could see the fabric of existence, that life is an inconceivably large tree of choices that forms the current state of the universe among an infinite amount of universes (for each infinitesimal choice)"
e.g. I "felt" that there is a sibling branch in this tree of choices in which the universe is a slight modification of the current one. But curiously even when my whole personality disassociated from my "self", there was a "foundation" of my consciousness always attached to the current existence, and to it all parts of my personality that form my consciousness (id/superego/whatever) eventually converged once I got back normal.
> Because necessity requires logical laws; logical laws imply incontrovertible truth; such truth includes mathematical truth; mathematical truth defines numbers; numbers possess number relations; number relations imply equations; equations define computable relations; computable relations define all computations; all computations include algorithmically generated observers; and these observers experience apparent physical realities.
Our minds can only interpret the universe through a binary model, but that doesn't mean that the universe conforms to our binary interpretation of it.
"Why does anything exist?" becomes a silly question if you're capable of abandoning your rational mind for a minute and humbly accepting that perhaps the universe is an absolute system with no dualistic nature.
My problem with this attitude is what even are you talking about? Suppose we "abandon our rational mind" for a moment and sojourn into the irrational. How the heck are we supposed to take anything back from that experience and into the world of discourse? Presumably there is much more bullshit in the endless tracks of irrationality than truth and whatever mechanism by which we choose to carry ideas back clearly can't distinguish the two as it has abandoned anything like epistemology. So what is the point of even talking about it?
First, assuming that the universe is an absolute system doesn't mean we can't build models to interpret its nature through binary interpretations.
In the same way that a map is not the territory, a mental model for the universe isn't the universe.
So saying "abandon our rational mind" is just a rhetorical mechanism to establish that perhaps this is the wrong question, and we should reframe what we understand as absolute or relative.
You're incorrectly interpreting my words as a call for irrationality. I'm just saying that our interpretation of the universe and the debates about its origins are often based on ideas that can't be challenged because they are scientific truisms.
The problem is that anything that doesn't comply with our standard interpretation of the universe will be deemed esoteric and unscientific. Therefore, it neuters debates that could yield a valid interpretation of the universe.
I still don't really get it. Not all ideas which disagree with or go beyond the current best scientific models of the universe are considered non-scientific or esoteric (if this were the case scientific progress would be impossible).
How about this: state explicitly what strategies beyond empiricism, model building, ontology refinement, and epistemological reasoning you think can provide genuine verifiable insight about the world?
I'm not stating that any of those strategies are the wrong approach to interpreting the world.
I'm saying that when those strategies are applied axiomatically, there's no room to reinterpret what we know about the world because there's a general feeling that doing so will undo all scientific progress.
Take, for instance, the relativity vs. quantum mechanics debate. I'm not a physicist, but it's pretty evident that the biggest struggle of that debate is that most people want to reconcile both theories by unifying them through some other rational interpretation of the world. Whether or not that's possible remains to be proven, but a theory of everything may emerge from a completely different interpretation of the world. One that is rationally contrarian to what relativity and quantum mechanics tell us.
And this brings me back to my original argument, which is that perhaps we have the proper methods to understand the world, but we are just asking the wrong questions.
there is much wrong with this post, I'm embarrassed to respond to it. Our minds don't interpret the world through a binary model. Abandoning your rational mind means what exactly?
Look at the rest of the debate below the original answer, and maybe you will get an idea of what I meant.
My choice of words shouldn’t be the basis for attacking my points, especially since there’s more context in this very same thread that expands on my ideas.
Maybe instead of coming against me with an incendiary comment, make an effort to gain more insight into my views and add some value to the discussion. Again, my choice of words might be the wrong articulation of my ideas, but you just need to ask politely, and I will gladly expand and try to find better words.
Don’t sweat it. Thanks for the reply. And if it helps at all I agree that “binary” was the wrong word. I couldn’t come up with anything else that articulated what I was thinking.
What I meant is that us humans have this tendency to describe the world through dualistic models: good and bad, light and dark, mind and body, reason and emotion, nurture and nature, etc.
Inarguably this model has helped us to rationalize a lot of insights about the universe. However there are probabably a lot of ideas about our universe that can only be described through a dialectic model.
In fact, it was this type of thinking what allowed Einstein to image the paradox that gave birth to the general theory of relativity.
There is a known old argument in St. Anslem, Leibnitz and Gödel for that in a pantheistic picture. Gödel adopted higher order modal logic, and factors the question via the axiom 'if possible then actual' (god/reality existence). I'm now pleased to discover that in 2017 someone has went through the pains of porting the thing to a proof verifier, Isabelle/HOL (they start from Melvin Fitting reconstruction of the idea in 1999).
This is a lot of ground to cover to get to what is, in my opinion, a very bizarre conclusion which is epistemologically extremely lugubrious: that all structures expressible mathematically also exist and we are (obviously) a subset of those structures.
Frankly, this doesn't even feel like any kind of knowledge to me. Its operationally meaningless! In any case, I think the author has the cart before the horse: numbers (and other sorts of mathematics) do not pre-exist reality. Numbers are abstractions of regularities we see in nature.
Mathematics is nothing but the observation of regularities in certain sorts of elaborate rituals involving making markings on paper. Many of those rituals are inspired by and correlated with regularities which exist in the world, but its difficult to me to see any reason to believe that they have an independent existence.
Yeah I had to skim through it as well. I think the author probably has written something that has passed peer review, but has either written so many such things that he has gotten sick of terseness and getting to the point, or so few things that he has not learned to value it in the first place? Like the writing is not god-awful like a lot of the crackpot takes, but it's definitely tortuous.
As a theory goes, I don't think this one is successful. It probably either implies that time is an illusion or that we are all Boltzmann brains, and I would take it as a baseline desideratum that our fundamental understanding of the universe does not come in either of these shapes. (Both essentially state “actions don't exist” in different ways, and if the universe is the place where activities occur, the place where things happen, then the idea that nothing is really happening in there appears to fail hard.)
Of course is a Christian and a mystic, my understanding of my own answer is that it is also carefully calculated nonsense, nonsense in service of some sort of artistic goal, so I'm not in a great place to really criticize. He can struggle with his mythos and I can struggle with mine, haha.
Why believe anything about this question at all? I feel quite strongly that the proper mental posture towards many questions is "I don't have a very compelling reason to hold a strong opinion on that." This feeling it buttressed by the fact that there are a great many tractable scientific and philosophical mysteries which are as yet unresolved. It seems premature to tackle this particular one, perhaps because I fundamentally disagree with the author that we are at a stage in history where it can be tackled "scientifically."
Sorry that I'm not seeing this until 8 days later, haha.
What I will say is that this particular question is a sort of meta-question. So the underlying question is "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and the basic standpoints are:
- Theistic: This question is meaningful/answerable, but the answer strains our comprehension ability. Creatio ex nihilo, somehow the somethingness comes out of the nothingness, and our ability to understand is not altogether there.
- Scientistic: This question is meaningful and has an ordinarily-intelligible answer, "because of Something with a Capital S."
- Atheistic: This question is not meaningful and therefore cannot have an answer.
- Agnostic: I don't have enough data yet to judge whether this question would be meaningful, or whether it at least in principle has an answer.
Because we're not asking "what is the answer to 'why is there something rather than nothing?'" but rather asking "is that a meaningful/answerable question in the first place?" the agnostic is in an unusually difficult position that does not obtain in other sorts of agnosticism. The problem is that it does not seem prima facie like this is a more unusual question than any of the other ones we ask on a normal basis. It doesn't have any complicated words, it does not appear to be self-referential, no word is being used twice (and therefore not in a way that might set it into two different contexts so that it has two different meanings)... the only thing that is different is that this question has somewhat of a larger scope than we are conventionally used to.
So normally the agnostic is free of the "burden of proof" and can "cop out" but in this case the agnostic finds themselves needing to justify a bit why this particular usage of those words might be problematic for deciding whether the question is likely to be answerable.
Nice that you can step out of the frame and see your motivations.
I write this because I think that your self knowledge is virtuous and like a moth to a flame I am drawn to the good. By identifying with the good or ingesting it like knowledge candy - I can come closer to this platonic concept that my nervous system so craves.
I can no more step outside of my own seeking than a wave can stand up from the ocean and make its way in land.
> numbers (and other sorts of mathematics) do not pre-exist reality. Numbers are abstractions of regularities we see in nature.
This is an open and ancient question. I don't suppose to have the answer. I will say, the case for mathematics pre-existing is stronger than what you refute here.
You're right, of course, that this is an open question. But the posted article saunters about the fields of an incredibly deep question by glibly asserting idealism about mathematical structures. It is an awfully weak foundation upon which to build an answer to such a fundamental question.
It is _at least_ plausible that numbers supervene upon existence and not the other way around, which makes the entire exercise in the article seem suspect in its presentation, at the very least.
Would you _really_ say that the case for mathematical idealism is that strong? The Philpapers survey seems to suggest philosophers are approximately evenly split on this question (idealists at 39%, nominalists at 38%).
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadIt's like asking what is P(A|A).
The question "Why do I not exist" has never and will never be (seriously) asked.
[1] To be clear, if only nothing existed, and there existed nothing other than nothingness. [2]
[2] I sense epistemologists warming their guns here, asking if the "existence" of "nothing" counts as the existence of "something". I.e. is "nothing" something?
If I asked how biology worked, you wouldn't say "Survivorship bias: if biology didn't work, you wouldn't be here to ask the question."
With respect to the question of the existence of everything, I can't take the Universe or a Universe and study its properties as an external and impartial observer.
If I was the only organism in the Universe, I could still try to study my body and reach limited conclusions, like we do with physics, but I couldn't go further without dissecting myself or injecting myself with potentially hazardous substances, which would kill me. And I certainly would never be able to answer the question of where I came from if I didn't know about the concept of gender, sex, and reproduction, which I couldn't know about if I was the only organism to have ever existed from my point of view.
So I am dismissing the original question.
He was an incredible intellect, but not everything he said is going to be a winner.
It's not like asking P(A|A), it's not even asking why P(A) > P(N). It's asking why P(A) > 0, which it evidently is.
Statistically, one could make the argument that there are infinite possibilities of A(nything) and just one of N(othing), so the odds are stacked infinitely high against nothingness.
This reminds me of the classic joke that all probabilities are 50/50. Either a thing happens or it doesn't.
>Survivor bias. If nothing existed [1], we wouldn't be here to ask the question.
Survivor bias leading to the question is not the reason anything exists, in the same way you being alive to ask this question is not the reason you're alive. In both cases existence is simply a pre-requisite to asking the question, but it does not answer it.
>It's like asking what is P(A|A).
No, that is misinterpretation of the question. The question is not "What is the probability that anything exists, given that anything exists?", it's asking "Why does anything exist?", as per the title.
>The question "Why do I not exist" has never and will never be (seriously) asked.
Haven't given much thought to this, and at face value, yes, you're right. But "seriously" is ambiguous and there are some interesting questions here regarding the possibility of an evil demon like entity, or, more interestingly, GPT-3 posing this question.
Saying something is like someone asking questions about logical propositions generally isn't considered bad form: logic actually has more to recommend it than probability theory - logic is when probability theory suggests certainty and probability theory is what you get due to logic applied to hidden information. Logic is therefore always more certain and stable than probabilistic claims: it is what you have when certainty exists.
I don't find the statement which translates to it being like reasoning perfectly to be particularly strong as a dismissal. It doesn't even seem to merit the rank of disagreement - the article does go into discussion of logical propositions and has it very near the fundamentals. So saying it is like it is effectively just a repetition of what the article states, but using different words.
You appear to me to be stating premises within the text and implying that the existence of logical reasoning means you disagree, but that doesn't quite make sense to me. To dismiss the argument would require that you first disagree with it at least once, which you haven't done, and probably ought to have a stronger foundation that the rejection of logical relationships. After all, if you reject those, then you've also rejected probability theory - with it your reject observation, which is related to both logic and probability via sampling. The rejection on the basis of being like logic has corollaries of claiming to be both blind and incapable of coherent reasoning. This isn't a very strong basis for dismissal.
Physics: No energy: the vacuum
Geometry: No dimensionality: a point
Set theory: No elements: the empty set
Arithmetic: No magnitude: zero
Information theory: No information: zero bits
Then they ask: "There is an unlimited number of possible theoretical systems. Does this mean there are also unlimited conceptions of nothing?"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuji_%28philosophy%29
> Physics: No energy: the vacuum
And not being aware of the difference can lead one to dumbly misunderstand the question with confidence (e.g. some physicist explaining how the universe could have arisen out of "nothing," when they're really explaining how it could have arisen out of a vacuum, which metaphysically is definitely a something).
Are you saying that you can't define "absence"?
But asking me is silly and pointless: I'm no philosopher. And even if philosophers have trouble, that doesn't mean there's no merit to the concept: it just means its difficult.
> and I am highly suspect that metaphysics has philosophical value.
I'm pretty sure you meant the exact opposite of what you actually said, and I strongly suspect you're wrong.
But the creation of our universe definitely involved some process that dumped a shit ton of energy into a very small space about 14 billion years ago.
With regards to "why something rather than nothing", here's an article on the "levels of nothing". Even if there were to be no universe, no laws, etc ... could mathematics still exist?
https://www.closertotruth.com/articles/levels-nothing-robert...
Similar to the many world interpretation of quantum mechanics. All possibilities exist. Both a something and a nothing.
>This leaves us with a point.
That's still not nothing.
Without an external reference frame, there's no extrinsic information about the point, and if the point is dimensionless, then there is no intrinsic information, either.
What you are left with, is the notion of a point, with no way to describe or observe it.
Carnap and Quine (to say nothing of Kant) wrote extensively about the problems that arise when treating metaphysical "existence" as a predicate.
There are strong reasons to adopt ontological anti-realism. I'm amused when folks muse extensively in the ontological mode without addressing the elephant in the room—most of it is likely nonsense.
The general notion of existence, at least in natural language, seems to be a shorthand for quantification or negation. I'm not sure what it would mean for "existence" to exist, short of adopting Platonism or some bizarre metaphysical system.
The "something rather than nothing" question, if stated coherently, would likely be beyond the scope of human knowledge. Although ultimately I don't think it can be stated in a way that makes sense.
Why do you think "something rather than nothing" question doesn't make sense?
I adopt ontological anti-realism and do not stray into "existence" claims because they simply raise too many methodological issues. The quotes here are important because I don't have an intuitive understanding of what people mean when they say "exists" in the first place.
You could rephrase "Experience exists" as "Humans experience" or "I experience," which is analogous to Cogito in Cogito, ergo sum but without the ergo sum. There's a subject and a predicate already, and "exists" adds nothing.
If you want to make substantive claims about what does or doesn't exist, your views are subject to relatively straightforward reductio ad absurdums. This is demonstrated pretty clearly in On What There Is.
> Why do you think "something rather than nothing" question doesn't make sense?
"Something" = quantifier, "nothing" = quantifier, existential "is" = quantifier. Again, I would insist on a predicate here.
This is _necessarily_ true, to believe otherwise is to make an absurdist claim that humans are somehow special. It's "the earth is the center of the universe" all over again.
Of course, you could always take the truly absurd way out, and claim that _you_ are what is special, and everything else is mere simulacrum for you by you. By all means, admit to this.
> "Mathematical truth implies the existence of all computations. The existence of all computations implies the existence of all observers. The existence of all observers leads to a quantum mechanical reality populated with all possibilities and ruled by simple laws."
Extra points to the author for including a link to Eugene Wigner's "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" (1960). For convenience:
https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf
"Why Does the World Exist? (An Existential Detective Story)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Does_the_World_Exist%3F
What is added by saying the laws of physics "exist"? Note that we already know they are true.
When I was five years old I asked my dad what was beyond the "edge" of the Universe. He said "There is no edge, it goes on infinitely forever. Even if there was an edge, there would have to be something beyond that, even if it was a vacuum right?".
I literally cried myself to sleep trying to visualize this.
When I told this to a friend he answered, "Everywhere."
IOW words or phrases that skip the rather prominent liabilities of those same (tired?) words/models but also work well at such a global scope and scaffold nicely.
Thanks for posting.
Imagine a wave that can at any point oscillate up or down. If it does both and splits, it eventually will create all possible states of anything imaginable. Some of the waves become more and more complex, until in very rare cases structure and rules form within the wave function itself. Akin to Conway’s Game of Life. So universes with (seemingly) deterministic laws of any kind are just extremely rare sub-trees of this wave of ”every possible wavestate”.
All the peculiarities like dimensions are illusions the same way a multidimensional array to a computer is ultimately just one-dimensional, with logic to treat it as multi-dimensional.
I also like the explanation that concept of nothingness is categorically invalid because there clearly is existence (or is there? Maybe this is the ultimate ”nothing”?), but the theory of all possible states sounds even better.
Definitely not claiming this is true but intuitively feels like the best explanation for this existence… that this universe with all its laws is a rare sub-tree of all possible states of a simple oscillator. Other universes with other laws exist further up the tree in its other branches. In between, voids and vacuums and undeterministic universes
It seems like a good idea to move away from such a reality model in that case. Ideally to replace it with either several good plugins or a new metamodel which can encompass its strengths and weaknesses.
I.e. reality can be a helpful term to describe "I found a new and helpful perspective for looking at a thing." That's a big strength and one commonly seen as people migrate between beliefs.
"Why does something exist?" "God did it." "Uh, ok, why does God exist?" "Dunno, just does." <- sure seems like you could have simply applied that last answer to the first question and it'd be exactly as useful and valid.
"Why does something exist?" "The set of all possible wave states exists and behaves such-and-such way" "OK, but why does that exist and why does it do that?" "Dunno, just does". <- Ditto.
On that note though it definitely feels more logical and harmonious concept than ”God did it”. But I do get your point
With the "God did it" explanation, something vastly more complex and inscrutable is required (i.e. God) to make the explanation work. With this explanation, there is but a simple wave that splits on its possible oscillations. Our existence is on one of these.
No explanation will ever find the "bottom turtle." There will always be space for another "why?" question. The interesting part is probably more to do with the "asker" this question rather than the answer to it. That we have this capacity to think abstractly about this is, to me, more mind-blowing than the nature of existence itself.
But pushing things up a level is actually the only option we have for good explanations. For any explanation about anything whatsoever, you should always be able to ask “why is it this way rather than some other way?” It’s not some paradox or contradiction that there will never be an end to this series of explanations and questions, and any claim that there is an end is the bad kind of “appeal to the divine”!!
On the other hand, if the observations are truly random, then in general no shorter process can produce them, so there can be no good explanation for them. And the interesting thing is that if every good explanation compresses the original observations at least one bit further (otherwise they would not be good), there must be a point where the result is as short as it could possibly be. At this point, the series of good explanations would have to end (although I believe that it is undecidable to know when the end is reached).
It is also always possible for something that has a good explanation to actually be a brute fact, like the idea that the Earth was created with the appearance of old age: the good explanation would be that it aged, but the truth would be that it didn't.
I think "there's something rather than nothing because the set of all possible waves exists... like, somewhere" is roughly identical to "god did it", as opposed to, say, a hypothesis that things fall and planets orbit due to a universal force that causes matter to attract other matter, even if both just prompt another "why?" You can go do stuff with the latter—not so much with the former, which is more of a dodge than even a partial explanation.
A good test might be whether you can apply the answer to any "why?" that lacks an existing answer, with exactly the same utility and validity in every case. Take the example of the question suggested by the explanation of universal gravitation:
"OK, why does gravity exist, then?"
"God did it / that's just what our little corner of the set of all possible waves happens to look like"
There's simply no specificity to them, and they amount to "just because".
"So how does this help us understand why the universe exists? We’re starting from all possible rules. And basically we’re saying that having a universe that operates in the way we perceive ours to operate is an inevitable consequence of there being all these possible rules. Or, in other words, if these rules “exist” then it follows that so will our universe.
But what does it mean for rules to “exist”, and in particular for all possible rules to exist? The key point, I believe, is that it’s in a sense an abstract necessity. The set of all possible rules is something purely formal. It can be represented in an infinite number of ways. But it’s always there, existing as an abstract thing, completely independent of any particular instantiation.
It’s crucial that we’re talking about all possible rules. If we were talking about particular rules, then we’d need to specify which rules those are, and we’d need a whole language and structure for doing that. But that’s not our situation. We’re talking about all possible rules. We can construct some explicit symbolic representation for these rules, but the deductions we make ultimately won’t depend on this; they would work the same whatever representation we chose to construct.
We might have assumed that to get our universe we’d need some definite input, some specific information. But what we’re discovering is that our universe is in some sense like a tautology; it’s something that has to be the way it is just because of the definition of terms. In effect, it exists because it has to, or in a sense because everything about it is a “logical inevitability”, with no choice about anything."
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/04/why-does-the-uni...
Wow!
This is very similar to what I experienced when I accidentally ingested a large amount of psilocybin (and went to ER just in case, it was the most terrifying experience of my life).
This is what I wrote in my notes post the bad trip:
"I felt a disconnection from my self and could see the fabric of existence, that life is an inconceivably large tree of choices that forms the current state of the universe among an infinite amount of universes (for each infinitesimal choice)"
e.g. I "felt" that there is a sibling branch in this tree of choices in which the universe is a slight modification of the current one. But curiously even when my whole personality disassociated from my "self", there was a "foundation" of my consciousness always attached to the current existence, and to it all parts of my personality that form my consciousness (id/superego/whatever) eventually converged once I got back normal.
> Why does anything exist?
> Because necessity requires logical laws; logical laws imply incontrovertible truth; such truth includes mathematical truth; mathematical truth defines numbers; numbers possess number relations; number relations imply equations; equations define computable relations; computable relations define all computations; all computations include algorithmically generated observers; and these observers experience apparent physical realities.
I'm not convinced. Does anyone follow this?
"Why does anything exist?" becomes a silly question if you're capable of abandoning your rational mind for a minute and humbly accepting that perhaps the universe is an absolute system with no dualistic nature.
So saying "abandon our rational mind" is just a rhetorical mechanism to establish that perhaps this is the wrong question, and we should reframe what we understand as absolute or relative.
You're incorrectly interpreting my words as a call for irrationality. I'm just saying that our interpretation of the universe and the debates about its origins are often based on ideas that can't be challenged because they are scientific truisms.
The problem is that anything that doesn't comply with our standard interpretation of the universe will be deemed esoteric and unscientific. Therefore, it neuters debates that could yield a valid interpretation of the universe.
How about this: state explicitly what strategies beyond empiricism, model building, ontology refinement, and epistemological reasoning you think can provide genuine verifiable insight about the world?
I'm saying that when those strategies are applied axiomatically, there's no room to reinterpret what we know about the world because there's a general feeling that doing so will undo all scientific progress.
Take, for instance, the relativity vs. quantum mechanics debate. I'm not a physicist, but it's pretty evident that the biggest struggle of that debate is that most people want to reconcile both theories by unifying them through some other rational interpretation of the world. Whether or not that's possible remains to be proven, but a theory of everything may emerge from a completely different interpretation of the world. One that is rationally contrarian to what relativity and quantum mechanics tell us.
And this brings me back to my original argument, which is that perhaps we have the proper methods to understand the world, but we are just asking the wrong questions.
My choice of words shouldn’t be the basis for attacking my points, especially since there’s more context in this very same thread that expands on my ideas.
Maybe instead of coming against me with an incendiary comment, make an effort to gain more insight into my views and add some value to the discussion. Again, my choice of words might be the wrong articulation of my ideas, but you just need to ask politely, and I will gladly expand and try to find better words.
Also, if you’re embarrassed to respond, then why did you? Please read the Hacker News guidelines if you forgot about them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What I meant is that us humans have this tendency to describe the world through dualistic models: good and bad, light and dark, mind and body, reason and emotion, nurture and nature, etc.
Inarguably this model has helped us to rationalize a lot of insights about the universe. However there are probabably a lot of ideas about our universe that can only be described through a dialectic model.
In fact, it was this type of thinking what allowed Einstein to image the paradox that gave birth to the general theory of relativity.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317956529_Types_Tab...
Frankly, this doesn't even feel like any kind of knowledge to me. Its operationally meaningless! In any case, I think the author has the cart before the horse: numbers (and other sorts of mathematics) do not pre-exist reality. Numbers are abstractions of regularities we see in nature.
Mathematics is nothing but the observation of regularities in certain sorts of elaborate rituals involving making markings on paper. Many of those rituals are inspired by and correlated with regularities which exist in the world, but its difficult to me to see any reason to believe that they have an independent existence.
As a theory goes, I don't think this one is successful. It probably either implies that time is an illusion or that we are all Boltzmann brains, and I would take it as a baseline desideratum that our fundamental understanding of the universe does not come in either of these shapes. (Both essentially state “actions don't exist” in different ways, and if the universe is the place where activities occur, the place where things happen, then the idea that nothing is really happening in there appears to fail hard.)
Of course is a Christian and a mystic, my understanding of my own answer is that it is also carefully calculated nonsense, nonsense in service of some sort of artistic goal, so I'm not in a great place to really criticize. He can struggle with his mythos and I can struggle with mine, haha.
What I will say is that this particular question is a sort of meta-question. So the underlying question is "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and the basic standpoints are:
- Theistic: This question is meaningful/answerable, but the answer strains our comprehension ability. Creatio ex nihilo, somehow the somethingness comes out of the nothingness, and our ability to understand is not altogether there.
- Scientistic: This question is meaningful and has an ordinarily-intelligible answer, "because of Something with a Capital S."
- Atheistic: This question is not meaningful and therefore cannot have an answer.
- Agnostic: I don't have enough data yet to judge whether this question would be meaningful, or whether it at least in principle has an answer.
Because we're not asking "what is the answer to 'why is there something rather than nothing?'" but rather asking "is that a meaningful/answerable question in the first place?" the agnostic is in an unusually difficult position that does not obtain in other sorts of agnosticism. The problem is that it does not seem prima facie like this is a more unusual question than any of the other ones we ask on a normal basis. It doesn't have any complicated words, it does not appear to be self-referential, no word is being used twice (and therefore not in a way that might set it into two different contexts so that it has two different meanings)... the only thing that is different is that this question has somewhat of a larger scope than we are conventionally used to.
So normally the agnostic is free of the "burden of proof" and can "cop out" but in this case the agnostic finds themselves needing to justify a bit why this particular usage of those words might be problematic for deciding whether the question is likely to be answerable.
I can no more step outside of my own seeking than a wave can stand up from the ocean and make its way in land.
Pointless. All of it.
This is an open and ancient question. I don't suppose to have the answer. I will say, the case for mathematics pre-existing is stronger than what you refute here.
It is _at least_ plausible that numbers supervene upon existence and not the other way around, which makes the entire exercise in the article seem suspect in its presentation, at the very least.
Would you _really_ say that the case for mathematical idealism is that strong? The Philpapers survey seems to suggest philosophers are approximately evenly split on this question (idealists at 39%, nominalists at 38%).